Declan O’Brien was given the reigns to your favorite mutant hillbillies with Wrong Turn 3 and now he steps back up to the plate with their origin story, Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings.

This time he changes things up a bit by shifting the shooting location to snowy Winnipeg and filming inside a historic hospital for the insane. As for the body count? Well it’s as high (maybe even higher) than ever.

“At an isolated hospital deep in the West Virginia wilderness, three hideously deformed mutants go on a merciless killing spree. Now, decades later, this family of blood-thirsty cannibals is stalking new prey: a group of young skiers trapped by a blizzard. The abandoned medical wards soon become killing fields as the panicked victims come face to face with a chilling choice — fight back or die. With bonus footage too graphic for theaters, ‘Wrong Turn 4’ takes you to the most terrifying place of all…the beginning.”

I recently caught up with O’Brien on the phone and had a quick chat about the shoot. Check it out after the jump!Bloody-Disgusting: Did you approach Wrong Turn 4 from a different angle than Wrong Turn 3?

Declan O’Brien: Well on this one I had a lot more freedom because it’s an origin story. I was a little more free to create how everything began. So in terms of story I could do pretty much anything I wanted to. ‘Wrong Turn 3’ had to follow 2 and 1 chronologically, that sort of stuff.

BD: This one has a different visual template from the others in the sense that it takes place in a snowbound environment. It’s a totally different color palette. Was that exciting for you to work with?

DO: Yeah that was a ton of fun. The movie was shot in Winnipeg in February, which was minus 45 degrees one night while shooting which wasn’t too much fun. But visually, changing the color palette and giving it a creepy vibe, as opposed to being out in the woods in the bright daylight the entire time, [I found] there was a lot more you could do in a dark, wintery cold environment.

BD: In terms of the ensemble, it’s fairly large. What was it like pulling that together?

DO: It was hard at times, you have to service all of these characters. But it was satisfying because the more people you have, the more people you can kill.

BD: As with all the Wrong Turn movies there’s a great sort of gonzo nature to the kills. What was your favorite one to orchestrate?

DO: My favorite one is the effed up fondue scene. I’ve never seen that before and I think the actor did a really good job in dying. And the practical effects guys did a really good job in pulling it off. I found it was really disgusting yet perversely funny at the same time, which is what I was going for.

BD: It seems like you use a lot more practical than CGI. How many hours did a typical kill take to set up?

DO: The hanging scene took the entire day of shooting. Each big kill that I would do I would take the entire day. The CG on this movie was minimal, just snow enhancement and stuff like that. I really wanted to go practical and see what we could achieve and I had a really good crew out of Toronto and they pulled it off.

BD: How did you find the location of the sanitorium?*

DO: It was funny, I came up with the idea for the script and I knew of an old hospital that I had shot at before in Bulgaria or Romania. And I kind of wrote the script around this location that I knew existed. But then, I got a call from a producer in Winnipeg who thought they had exactly what I was looking for. And soon enough I had pictures of this abandoned mental health facility called the Brandon Mental Health center which was built in 1910 and went out of service in the 80’s. And it was just completely creepy and had literally everything I had written for this other hospital. So we decided to go to Winnipeg.

BD: What’s up next for you?

DO: I just finished a screenplay for Fox and we’ll see if that goes into production. Other than that, a lot of golf.